GPUs in strange places: cloud rendering, armored tanks

Looking to offload some 3D renders? NVIDIA wants you to take them to the cloud …

The theme of NVIDIA's recent GPU Technology Conference could probably be summed up as, "look at all the non-gaming places where GPUs are now being used." And, truth be told, the show floor boasted a fairly impressive array of non-gaming GPU options. There were supercomputing-oriented demos aplenty, but even outside of high-performance computing, the GPU is finding its way into some interesting niches.

One of the first demos that we saw on entering the show floor was the MAGIC1 by GE's Intelligent Platforms division. Shown in the picture below, the unit is essentially a small form factor PC wrapped in a giant heatsink and rated to operate in temperatures from -40C to 55C.

The unit's CPU options are a Core 2 Duo (between 1GHz and 2.26 GHz) or a Freescale 8641D. For a GPU you can choose from a NVIDIA GT240, NVIDIA G73, or an Intel 4500MHD IGP. Mass storage comes in the form of an SSD that can be up to 256GB in size, and memory options range from 1GB to 4GB of DRAM.

I/O is done through a pair of threaded ports on one end of the unit, which you can see in the stock photo below. One of those large ports is a video connector that has leads for a pair of DVI/VGA outs and a TV in. The other port is for general I/O, and it has leads for three Gigabit Ethernet connections, four USB, a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, two RS-232 legacy ports, stereo line in and out, and another VGA out. The third, smaller port is a 28v DC in.

The MAGIC1, sans outside heatsink

Below is a block diagram of the unit, for the curious.

MAGIC1 block diagram

The GE reps at the booth told me that the military is a popular customer for the MAGIC1, but they also have some industrial customers, as well. Most of their customers don't like to talk publicly about what they do with these systems, so we couldn't get any details on exactly how they're deployed.

Serving up renders over the Web

The Mental Images booth

Fans of Dave Girard's 3D articles will probably already know about Mental Images' RealityServer 3.0, which lets you serve up real-time renders over the Web.

The software can be installed on a server with a number of GPUs from either NVIDIA or AMD, and it essentially lets users remotely control the popular iray renderer from over the Internet. iray pushes frames to the remote client, and the client can move around the rendered scene in real-time, altering bits of it here and there. RealityServer can talk to any client that speaks HTTP, so you can use HTML, Flash, Silverlight, and anything else to connect to it.

There was a third-party add-on vendor across the show floor that was demonstrating an architectural product, where you could do a virtual tour of a dwelling in a Web browser. The renders looked great, and they were being served up by RealityServer from a remote datacenter.

Given that bandwidth is the bottleneck for all of these remote-render schemes, it's going to be a while before we're using a browser to fly around a photorealistic cityscape that's being rendered in a far-off data center. But it's cool to know that you already can do such a flight very, very slowly.

The Mental Images rep at the booth told us that the package is aimed at designers—automotive and architecture, to name two—who want to be able to walk through a set of renders for an off-site client, tweaking options and changing camera angles as they go.